Mulder stood with his hands rigid, fingers pointing at the floor, like someone who had just been given an electric shock. Even his hair seemed to be standing on end, or at least was so unkempt as to give that impression. His face was transfixed with a mixture of horror and rage.
"How the hell could this have happened?" he demanded.
The guard looked at him and at the bug-eyed Chief of Police. She said, "She had those running shoes on. Mostly we take the laces, but since we were just holding her for Juvie to pick up, nobody thought to treat her like an adult prisoner. I mean, she was just a kid, you know." She was talking too much and too fast, her eyes wide like a panicked horse's. Mulder turned, aiming his rage at her, but at the sight of her pale face he realized there were more victims around than poor Flower. He said, "You think this was a suicide?"
The guard's mouth opened and closed several times before she spluttered, "What do you mean? She was in there by herself, wasn't she? No one could get in and out without us seeing them, could they?"
Mulder turned around and walked away. That was all he could do.
In the parking lot waves of heat seemed to radiate up from the asphalt like the fires of hell. He burned his fingers on the hot metal of the car door when he unlocked it. Inside, he wrapped his arms around the steering wheel and put his forehead on it and thought, Scully, they killed her and I couldn't stop them. I'm so sorry, sorry, sorry. Emotion flooded him, a jumble of pictures, the girl's face, still a baby face, but innocence being crowded out by a bitter cynicism, her little feet; someone had knelt and tied those shoes so lovingly only a very few years ago, knotted the laces twice so they wouldn't come undone, and today someone, as sure as he was sitting here, had unlaced them and wrapped them around each other and used them to choke her to death, then to hang the body from one of the cell bars.
Tears came. He was so glad now that Scully hadn't come. It would hurt her like this, like it was hurting him.
Flower. Flower. For a few seconds he let himself cry over her, because he knew no one else ever would. There was no shame in it. If a man couldn't spare a few tears for the death of a little girl, what good was he?
After a few minutes he sat up and scrubbed his face with both hands, running his fingers through his hair, trying to get back on track. He was getting the beginnings of a sickening headache, a real blinder. He started the car, feeling aimless and lost, just wanting to get away from the police statio and the dead girl whose lead had gone nowhere.
He drove down the street to a crossroad he thought would lead back to the highway. It didn't. Instead, it curved around, back to the center of town, and he found himself in the midst of a section of town heavily peopled with shoppers, lunch goers, bus riders huddled together at stops. He couldn't seem to find his way back. He stopped for a light. Must think clearly. Flower was dead. There was no doubt in his mind that someone had murdered her to keep her from telling him something. But maybe she'd already told him, if only he could figure out what it was.
His head was really starting to throb now. Thump thump thump thump.
He felt the vibration run like cold water down his spine. Something bad coming. By the pricking of my thumbs, /Something wicked this way comes.
Something wicked bad.
Across the road, coming out of a Dairy Queen, the hitchhiker strolled down the sidewalk, wiping her hands on her thighs. Her long blonde hair swayed as she walked, her checked shirt was untucked from her jeans, flapping behind her. For some reason her ankle-high white running shoes were filthy with mud. She walked directly across the street without looking right or left. When she reached the opposite sidewalk, she turned her head a little and looked at him from the corners of her eyes, a little elfish smile curving her mouth up to reveal a dimple.
Mulder gave a grunt of surprise and hit the accelerator. He almost hit a woman pushing a stroller, who then demonstrated for her infant the correct way to shoot a finger at a motorist. Sorry, sorry, sorry. He wove through people who seemed to be crossing the road haphazardly, not bothering to go to the intersections, and tried to follow the bouncing blonde hair. She turned and went through an alleyway, and he hurried to get to the next intersection, to turn right and then right again. But the second right was blocked by construction.
For the next half hour, Mulder followed the girl, or glimpses of the girl, through a bewildering maze of streets. She never seemed to speed up or to slow down, but simply appeared in front of him, or to his left, or to his right, in impossible places all out of geometric logic to the places he expected to see her. All the streets looked alike to him, until suddenly he realized there were no more pedestrians on the sidewalks.
He was on a deserted avenue, with a row of two story brick buildings hunched down on either side of him. They all seemed to be a single structure, all closed, boarded windows, doors barred with wrought iron. Graffiti sprayed on the bricks proclaimed the Ruthless Assassins as the sinister presence in the neighborhood. RA was everywhere.
Mulder watched the abandoned store fronts slip by, feeling queasy. It wasn't just his headache, it was that damn thumping. He could feel it in the fillings of his teeth. Like music that sometimes gets in the blood and can't be gotten rid of. He slowed the car to a crawl, driving with one hand and massaging his temple with the other.
And then he saw the sign, written large in felt tip pen:
"Issies. Come round back."
Shit! He hit the brake and lurched forward hard enough to lock his seatbelt. Issie's. Son of a bitch. Right under his nose.
He found a side street, more of an alley, and dove down it. The back of the building was apparently the front, because there it was, the three balls above the door, the glass front, the big oak entrance way, everything he'd seen in the photo. And on the window, "Issie's" painted in that odd dark script.
In the empty parking lot he stopped the car and sat for a few minutes listening to the pop and sizzle of the cooling engine. His headache was worse, if that was possible. Migraine? A brain aneurism? He wanted to vomit from it.
He got out of the car and gathered his resources for a moment, performed the standard Mulder checklist, an almost superstitious ritual, touching the knot of his purple and grey tie to make sure it was knotted squarely in front, touching his fly to make sure it was zipped up, touching his I.D., his wallet, his gun, and his handcuff case in a certain order that reassured him everything was in order, running a hand through his hair--he had owned a comb once, but that was long ago--and finally taking a deep breath and moving forward. Prepared for anything.
Well, almost anything.
There was a sign above the door that hadn't been obvious in the photo; it read, "Issie's Emporium." Looking up at it, Mulder saw three balls suspended over the entrance.
And then stopped in his tracks, staring.
There were indeed three balls. They had looked flat and colorless in the black and white photos. But up close, he could see that one was glittering gold, one was a strange silverish grey, the color of a thundercloud, and one was--what? Crystal? Neither clear nor opaque, but still prisming colors from the other two, like a fortune teller's crystal ball, swimming with mysterious secrets.
And they were moving, in strange sinuous revolutions, almost like small planets. The illusion was intensified by the fact that they were not suspended by any means he could see. No wires, no struts, no visible supports.
A movement in the window caught his eye, and Mulder saw the reflection of the hitchhiker wavering across the glass. He spun around, but the other side of the alley was only the backside of another row of buildings facing the next street over, a row of blank red brick unbroken by windows or doors.
Thump thump thump thump.
He stepped across the threshold and went inside.